Rome laid the patriarchal foundations upon which Western scholarship still rests. Its hierarchies of power are civic, religious, and intellectual. They are all modeled on the same vertical order. Father is above family, ruler is above citizen, and mind is above matter. Authority flowed top down, and the written word overwrote the spoken and embodied; record supplanted memory; doctrine displaced gnosis.

Modern academia inherited this structure almost intact, enshrining order and control as the highest expressions of ‘civilization’. It privileges abstraction over lived wisdom, intellect over intuition, and permanence over process. Beneath its language of progress, it still speaks the tongue of empire. It carries a legacy that silences what cannot be contained, classified, or cited.